Hotmail recovery is a joke. I used it as a junk account, not surprisingly got hacked, and gave them a ton of information and they still deemed it not mine. I had the name, address, people in contacts, emails sent out and it came back the whole "sorry, we can't verify this account is yours".
She didn't by chance have the "trusted contacts" set up in her Facebook did she?
https://www.facebook.com/help/119897751441086 You can set up friends on the list that if you get locked out and both email and FB hacked, they will send one of your trusted contacts a code, you call that friend and the friend gives you an unlock code.